Friday, January 26th

Friday will be a group presentation day and a FIRST PROOF QUIZ. Your only assigned task is to prepare for these.

A little more info about group presentations and what to expect:

Your group will have handed in (by Friday morning 8 am), a PDF (scan of handwriting is ok as long as it is legible) via canvas of at least the three main proofs assigned in the Groupwork Assignment (and possibly the extra one too), or whatever you have accomplished. I will assign a small grade for groupwork but it is assessed on a complete/partial/incomplete rubric. Errors are fine. In fact, I hope you make interesting errors, because that’s where learning happens.

In class, you will hand in a paper copy (handwritten is fine) of the Groupwork Report (you can find a blank copy under Resources). This is just a brief accounting of what happened in your group. It is very helpful for me to know how things went, whether there were sticking points and confusions, how long it took, etc. This should only take a few minutes to complete.

In class, I will use my computer to load up the PDFs from canvas. I will load up a proof and ask for the presenter from that group to come to the front and explain what their group wrote. The class will then discuss writing and reasoning and offer constructive criticism and praise. This is meant to be a safe environment for errors, and I ask you to be thoughtful in your comments. In fact, I will pick proofs that have interesting errors so we can all learn.

Some more information about the first proof quiz:

This is a bit of a dry run. Remember (from Grading), that we drop just less than half of the proof quizzes. But we need to get started so I can see where the class is.

The quiz will ask you to prove something similar to the proofs we have seen. In particular, it will ask for a proof like:

If n is even, then n^2 is even.

If n is odd, then 2n is even.

If n and m are odd, then n + m is even.

etc.

You may wish to examine my proof grading rubric, available under Resources.

The group presentations will be a great way of studying for the quiz, as we will discuss writing and reasoning for similar proofs.

Other comments:

I meant to get a bit farther today than we did; apologies we didn’t get to talk proofs. We will on Friday.

The back of today’s handout on Cartesian products is very interesting material, and I encourage you to wrestle with it on your own time; we may get a chance to come back to it in class in future. Meanwhile, Chapter 1.10 in Hammack talks about some of this.

I will set office hours as soon as my schedule settles down, but please just email me to set a time to meet as needed.